E-mail marketing - The Digital Communications Mix

2.4 The Digital Communications Mix

2.4.4 E-mail marketing

Much like the banner ad, the traditional e-mail campaign no longer catches the excite-ment of youth in the rapidly changing innovative world of digital marketing, but it is still an important part of the online communications mix. While actual response rates average at around 2.8 per cent, this is mainly because of poorly executed mass market-ing with undifferentiated content that is sent to badly maintained lists, which attain response rates of considerably less than 1 per cent. On the other hand, well-designed e-mail campaigns to specifically designed segments using a clean well-maintained data-base will often achieve 10– 15 per cent click rates. For many firms e-mail could very well form an important part of the firm’s customer relationship management strategy in growing the value of the existing customers. (McDonald 2012, 295)

For viral marketing the ease of forwarding e-mails makes it an ideal vehicle for many uses, especially as promotional messages passed from peer to peer. Most viral messages of this form are based on humor. As an example; Coca-Cola’s Happiness Machine vid-eo, a low-cost ad made explicitly for viral circulation and launched on Twitter, had 2.6 million views on YouTube in 2011. Other recipes for successful viral communication wound include their content to be shocking, clever, or compulsively informative. Ob-viously, these criteria may also be met by material which has actually nothing to do with brands, or which is created for negative purposes to create negative reactions for competitive or other reasons. (McDonald 2012, 295)

Last but not least regarding e-mails, are the all-important inbound e-mails, which may originally be service queries, but equally include the potential to form sales leads. A classic mistake by many companies is that they are so fixed on recruiting customers from their outbound campaigns that no attention or time is allocated to answer e-mails from definitive prospects. It is extremely important to include the inbound communi-cation in corporate marketing plans to guarantee that resources are available to re-spond to customers when they contact the company.

19 2.4.5 Viral Marketing

Successful execution or Viral Marketing, also called word-of-mouth marketing, is a concept that engages most marketers today. Social media form an infrastructure that makes it far more possible and executable than ever before. One single person’s expe-rience or recommendation can easily be entertainment for thousands if not millions of people. With the arrayed relationships in social media and the platforms available for viewing interesting things, it the substance and content becomes the main feature in-stead of the question of the possibility to reach a lot of people. (Treadaway & Smith 2012, 46)

Viral marketing is something that cannot be forced, it just tends to happen. When it is forced, it usually comes off as something insincere and most probably has actually the opposite effect of what was intended. When creating a viral marketing campaign, rele-vant are the assets that are naturally funny or entertaining and truly resonate with peo-ple. (Treadaway & Smith 2012, 48)

Viral marketing is something a marketer wants to work for, not against him. Earlier email was a method of spreading word-of-mouth content on the internet. Today, most do not send jokes and such on email, unless the content is truly interesting, really fun-ny, or related to someone’s work or social life. Social media is far less restrictive, and it could be said that is basically gives everyone a “loudspeaker”. Here lies the opportunity of Viral Marketing on the social media for marketers. Anything done or said, as well as anything to consumers do or say about you, has a true prospective to spread uncon-trollably. Customers now have the real power to comment on your brand, product, or company and therefore communicate this directly to a great number of other people much more efficiently than ever before. (Treadaway & Smith 2012, 46)

As said, negative publicity can also spread like wildfire. Today one can often see dis-gruntled customers willing to share negative experiences they’ve had with companies on the social media. Empowered customers, particularly active users of social media, know the power of publicity, and they are beginning to use social media to get what they want. A classic example of this was infamous United Breaks Guitars video of July

2009. An unhappy musician whose guitar was broken on a flight posted a video on YouTube that got more than three million views in the first two weeks. The created some truly significant negative publicity, in way never earlier possible. (Treadaway &

Smith 2012, 47)

2.5 Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing is a current form of marketing communications that is growing steadily in popularity. It enables integrating all forms of media and marketing commu-nications in order to drive sales, collect CRM data, and increase viral value. Mobile marketing can take a number of different forms, including messaging, mobile Internet, streaming media, and downloadable content. Consumers are accessible through this developing form of digital media, with mobile campaigns having the capacity to build a database of consumers that can be extracted for better understanding of the consum-er’s needs. This data can in turn help to develop effective targeted campaigns. (Cas-tronovo & Huang 2012, 119)

Mobile messaging enables marketers to extend their spread beyond traditional media, especially in direct marketing, when targeting precise segmented target groups and thus encourage instant consumer action upon seeing an advertisement. Different forms these actions would involve are of mobile alerts, content services, mobile coupons, voting, quizzes, and sweepstakes.

The mobile Internet allows marketers to enable the power of the Internet to deliver marketing content. Streaming media enables for content to be consumed as it is deliv-ered, and it be delivered as a choice of either on-demand streaming, or live streaming.

Streaming media can be used to deliver communications messages through sponsored advertisement content, video ads, or branded entertainment, all effective variations of a mobile marketing campaign. To increase consumer engagement with a campaign, the use downloadable content, acting as a motivator for campaign participation, can be especially effective.

The effectiveness mobile marketing is usually measured in terms of

cost-per-acquisition and the also relative level of user engagement in the different features of the campaign. Furthermore, mobile marketing provides the prospect to leverage social networks to escalate engagement with the brand through the consumption of digital content. As user are highly motivated to use their mobile devices to access social media networks, an arrangement of mobile-accessed social networks can be utilized to push marketing communications and therefore target precise segments of consumers. (Cas-tronovo & Huang 2012, 120)

A successful mobile viral marketing process include substantial influence of trust and perceived risk. This is especially true for mobile viral marketing actions using recom-mend-to-a-friend options as a principal focus on trust creation and therefore risk re-duction is vital for creating trust among these mobile users. Mobile viral marketing is fairly similar, from a psychological viewpoint, as is word-of-mouth marketing. It is therefore especially important to design and deliver mobile viral content that is timely, up-to- date, and personalized according to individual user identities. The basic re-quirements for acceptance of information technology, such as usefulness and ease of use, are also essential for mobile viral content. Furthermore, the creating amusing and enjoyable mobile viral content adds to the attractiveness of the offer. (Palka et al 2009, 183)

2.6 Strategic approaches to Social media marketing

A highly important consideration when designing and implementing social media mar-keting is designing for actual impact. This view focuses on the fact that while many superficial social media marketing actions are important and necessary, they still are isolated in aligning the company’s social business vision with its marketing process.

As marketing is nowadays an advanced discipline that does much more that identifies customers, satisfies them, and retains them in its own life cycle. Marketing includes actually demographics, social sciences, psychology, anthropology, and many other fields in maximizing its effectiveness of message transmission and finding customers and generating demand for products and services. (Hinchcliffe & Kim 2010, 82)

In social media marketing, same goals of customer acquisition, satisfaction, and reten-tion still exist, but the view in customer relareten-tionship management requires a radical rethink. Earlier it was quite straightforward to understand and measure the effects of actions in a restricted number of marketing channels using precise and branded mar-keting messages, the numbers game of social media marmar-keting is different. As social media marketing offers the possibility of a large number of channels with less structure makes identifying and segmenting audiences a highly challenging inefficient task.

(Hinchcliffe & Kim 2010, 83)

The process of identifying suitable social media segments is, however partly the chal-lenge of social media marking maximization. The other part is about how to figure the best combination of types of social media to use. From a strategic point of view there are four major strategic approaches to marketing with social media: (Hinchcliffe &

Kim 2010, 83)

 Local social media. A primary the choice in the early days of social media; crea-tion of own blogs, discussion forums, and online communities on own sites.

This approach allows marketers to retain a high level of control over experienc-es and content, however it doexperienc-es not fully engage the power of viral marketing.

 External social media. Social media as such started out as a fragmented space, containing millions of individual publishing channels and only a few large, prin-cipal social media sites such as MySpace as a forerunner (even these major sites were limited to a few million people at first). Developing over time, global so-cial networks have started to accumulate audiences of significant size, in the process attracting a so called critical mass of users and brands.

 Integrated social media. Multichannel efforts target user brand engagement in multiple ways, combining the previously described local and external social me-dia, as well as different offline experiences. The focus lies in delivering a

con-23

sistent, up-to-date, and synchronized social media experience, thus preparing large audiences for a deeper consequent engagement.

 Unified social businesses. The latest development of a strategic approach is something that is presently evolving, businesses where the actual boundaries be-tween workers, customers, and partners are indistinct. In marketing terms, de-fining the front line engagement becomes much more blurred; the most deeply engaged can be employees— or they may be customers or potential customers, or for example workers from a trading partner. The potential on this lies in the fact that user participation might greatly reduce, for example the cost to design, market, sell, and produce products. In a unified social business model, anyone can contribute, and everyone benefits from the result.

2.7 A seven-step framework for social media marketing communication Kumar & Mirchandani presented in their recent article a seven step model on social media marketing communication effectiveness thorough influential individuals (figure 3), which is a strategy that could also work for OSL.

Figure 3. Seven-Step Framework for Social Media Marketing (Kumar & Mirchandani 2012, 60)

The framework consists of the following seven steps:

1. Monitoring the conversations. Companies can gain access to valuable infor-mation, influential people and relevant conversations that already show en-gagement with the brand, by monitoring conversations that are related to the brand/company that are happening in the social media platforms.

2. Identifying individuals, considered influential, who can spread messages. From the data gained by monitoring the discussions, companies can identify a pool of influencers, of whom some might be convinced to spread the company’s mes-sage.

3. Identifying the factors shared by these influencer. Finding commonalities among these candidates and using these commonalities to create profiles of typ-ical influencers is the next important task. This prepares companies to easier lo-cate the influencers relevant to their future campaigns and encourage them to talk about the company’s products or services. These influencers on social me-dia exhibit high levels of engagement in three main aspects: Message spread (the times a message is forwarded, modified/unmodified, by the receivers), Influ-ence (the times the message is in turn re-forwarded by their recipients to their friends), and Social impact (comments and replies received per message).

4. Locating the influencers with interests relevant to the campaign and potential.

In finding these potential influencers for a specific campaign, it is not enough to identify just powerful influencers. Instead, identifying those influential users who are above all interested in the company’s category of goods and services, is of great importance. By identifying these influencers interested in their product categories, one can go further than simply listening to social media conversa-tions, but instead dynamically identifying potential brand ambassadors.

5. Recruiting these influencers with relevant interest, to communicate about the company’s product or service. Once the influencers who are particularly inter-ested in the product or service category have been identified, the next step logi-cal is to recruit those influencers to the campaign or campaigns to spread posi-tive word-of-mouth. Potential ways to achieve this is by developing and design-ing ways in which influencers can promote positive, traceable and measurable word-of-mouth.

6. Incentivizing the influencers to spread positive word-of-mouth. By creating buzz about the products or services in the social media campaign through influ-encers, both customers can be retained and prospects attracted.

7. Reaping the rewards from effective social media campaigns. Accurately measur-ing the performance of the social media campaigns is one tangible result of the above steps. By linking product and brand growth to positive word-of-mouth monitoring and tracking, companies can develop more effective social media campaigns, and as a result see better financial performance, more customer en-gagement and generally increased brand awareness. (Kumar & Mirchandani 2012, 61)

3 Marketing Communication plan Design and Tools

This chapter focuses on the design and practical tool in an integrated social media marketing communications plan. It presents an integrated model for the market com-munications plan, focusing on the interaction of the different elements, the looks into some features of modern social media marketing of mobile app’s, and finally examines the different tools of the social media marketing communication “toolbox” by recom-mending practical uses for these platforms.

3.1 Marketing Communications plan Design

There is plenty of marketing literature covering word-of-mouth marketing, Customer Relationship Marketing (CRM), brand communities, Search engine optimization (SEO), viral marketing, guerilla marketing, events-based marketing, and social media each as isolated objects, but fairly scarce on combining these element into a meaningful model incorporating the individual characteristics and advantages of all these. Fur-thermore, the research in this field has been fairly theoretic in nature, clearly lacking a model that is actionable and can be in a real life environment with a goal to achieve various marketing objectives. To meet this need Castronovo & Huang have developed a model based on the research findings in existing literature, visualized in figure 4. In the model the social media platform serves as the router through which all viable mar-keting communication actions are connected into one easily accessible, integrated con-sumer setting. Large portions of the marketing communication plan of OSL are based on this model. (Castronovo & Huang 2012, 120)

Figure 4. The OSL Social media marketing communication plan based on the model by Castronovo & Huang. (Castronovo & Huang 2012, 134)

3.1.1 The social media platform

The concept of word-of-mouth strategy forms the basis of the marketing communica-tion plan. The whole plan is centered on the goal of creating and sustaining positive

“buzz” for the OSL. The different components of the model work in an integrated way to emphasize the message that OSL wishes to communicate to users, thereby en-ticing user to pass along OSL’s message to other users.

As earlier described, the social media platform serves as the router through which all viable marketing communication actions are connected into one easily accessible, inte-grated consumer setting. Social media could be described as ubiquitous by nature and is characterized by the ability to almost instantaneously connect an infinite number of people. Therefore, it represents the hub of this model. One prerequisite for social

me-28

dia to be an effective platform for OSL, is that its presence must funnel through from the OSL main Website.

The platform could in practice take the form of any or all types of social media, includ-ing a blog, a YouTube channel, a Facebook page, and/or Twitter account. The specific social Medias chosen for OSL (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blog) reflect OSL’s real objectives in terms of the content it wishes to create, how this content will be commu-nicated to the users, the extent to which OSL engages users in a two-way dialogue, and also the amount of user conversion that is being sought. A blog is seen by OSL as an effective way to develop high quality, meaningful content for its users, as well as an effective means for clearly expressing OSL’s particular message. YouTube represents for OSL a way in which visual and humorous content can be generated. Facebook and Twitter are OSL’s main ways to engage users in conversation. All of these social media formats should have the potential to convert consumers into loyal users by connecting with them on a one-to-one level and cultivating the relationships with them. (Cas-tronovo & Huang 2012, 123)

3.1.2 Elements

For OSL, guerilla marketing, events-based marketing, and search engine optimization characterize the inputs that support the social media hub. The OSL Guerilla marketing focuses on the building of OSL’s reputation through unique tactical marketing execu-tions on a local scale. Using integration of guerilla marketing implementaexecu-tions with the social media hub, in pre- and post-campaign promotions via the social media platform, OSL should be able to multiply the effects of the individual guerilla program. Guerilla marketing therefore feeds into the OSL social media hub to encourage viral spreading through the OSL blogs and social networks that in turn increase the exposure and ef-fectiveness of the individual guerilla marketing program.

OSL’s Event marketing focuses on developing single relationships with members of OSL’s target audience. As with the guerilla marketing, integrating pre- and post-promotion of the events with OSL’s social media platform does enable the lifespan of the single event to be extended and the possible reach of the program to be extended

greatly. An OSL event can be documented through both videos and photos to be in-corporated into the OSL social media hub to be forwarded from user to user.

Search engine optimization (SEO) acts as groundwork support for the OSL social me-dia platform. It existence is reasoned to increase the effectiveness of exposing potential future users to OSL’s Website and social media platforms. SEO can be managed by

In document A B2C Digital Media Marketing Communications Plan for a Mobile Application Commercial Launch (sivua 22-0)